


There

by Barkour



Category: Thor (2011)
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-01
Updated: 2012-04-01
Packaged: 2017-11-02 20:30:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/373043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barkour/pseuds/Barkour
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jane has found Thor and in the finding, she has gone somewhere she'd never dreamed she'd see.</p>
            </blockquote>





	There

**Author's Note:**

> Commissioned fic for Carrie, whose kindness and generosity mean so much more to me than so trifling a piece as this could convey. Thank you.

"Jane." 

She turned blindly to him. Thor's fingertips brushed her arm, his thumb her elbow; his hand closed about hers. 

"Take care. There is a drop, there-- Just beyond this corner."

"Stick close to the wall," said Jane. "Got it." 

She squeezed his hand and his thumb swept over her knuckles, caressing each joint then settling again on the back of her hand. Jane inched forward on her toes, her free arm thrown out behind her, fingers and palm braced against the rock. A dull, greenish light pocked the blackness, where bits of phosphorescent crystals poked up from the rock; but it was only a little light, the sort of glow that offered not illumination but doubt. 

Thor's hand was warm about hers. The swordsman's calluses on his fingers rasped across her palm. If she squinted into that uncertain darkness, the breadth of Thor rose against it, darker even than the dark.

"So, what is this place?" Her own voice resounded. A sudden vault: the drop, waiting there, unseen and unknown without light to mark it.

Thor chuckled, a warm rumble, very near. "A secret place."

"Is that why we're walking--" A bit of loose rock skittered out from under her foot and then clattered off an edge and into silence. She pressed nearer to the rock and finished evenly: "In the dark, without even a flashlight?"

"My brother and I never used lights," said Thor. "I thought it would ruin the atmosphere."

"Well, if you ask me," Jane grumbled, "it would have improved it."

Thor laughed again. Probably his cheeks were dimpling. Those blue eyes crinkling at the corners. The darkness hid him, but her heart stuck all the same.

He tugged gently at Jane's hand. "The drop is behind us now. Walk beside me, Jane, please."

His fingers were thick, his palm wide, wrist strong. She swung his arm together with hers as she came up to walk alongside Thor. Dirt, gravel crunched beneath their feet. The padding in the back of her left sneaker had come loose; the edge of the plastic shaping dug into her heel.

"How much farther?"

"Not much," he said.

She swung their arms again, hers light, his heavy. Her shoulder brushed his biceps; she leaned, shyly, into him. 

"When I said I wanted to see more of Asgard," she said, "I meant I wanted to _see_ it."

He lifted her hand before him; she felt his fingers spreading then closing about her hand again. "Patience, Doctor Foster of Earth."

"I'm patient," she protested.

"You are never so," said Thor happily. "You are brash, stubborn, and you do not heed the strictures of others."

"Oh," said Jane, "and I suppose _you're_ Mister Never Rushes Into Things."

"No," said Thor, "but I should like to meet him and tell him how grand a name he has." He said this quite gravely.

Jane laughed and looked from the dark suggestion of his face to the dark before them. A shaft of light pierced the shadows far ahead, and when she breathed in, she smelled salt, brine.

"You know," she said, "for some big, tough god of thunder, you're a real goober."

He made a thoughtful noise. "What manner of beast is the goober?"

"It's not-- Not a beast," she said. "It's a peanut."

Another thoughtful noise. They neared the light, which shone upon stone littered with bits of stone and shell and sand.

"And what," said Thor, "is a peanut if not a beast?"

"Oh, my God," said Jane. "You guys don't have peanut butter?"

"Nay," said Thor, "I know not the butter of the peanuts. We have cows."

They stopped beneath the light. The ceiling of the tunnel had sloped down severely so that the opening in the rock was a mere few inches above Thor's head; for Jane, the distance was some few inches greater. Thor lifted her up by the waist through the hole, and when she'd got her seat on the edge, he raised himself up beside her. He smiled at her.

"What think you?"

"Oh, my God," said Jane again. "Thor--"

They'd emerged from rock rising out of a little beach, the sands a brilliant white that shimmered with hints of jewel tones: blues, greens, a fierce red that bled into violet when she turned her head. Steep, dark cliffs rose all about them, so that the cove was small and truly private. The ocean lapping at the beach was dark, too, but richly blue, and there, in the water, halfway out to the horizon, something like a star burnt far beneath the waves.

"What _is_ that?"

She'd got to her feet and started down the rock by the time Thor swung his legs up.

"The heart of Sinmara," he called.

"Who?" She kicked her shoes off and bent to peel off her socks, too.

"Sinmara. A daughter of Muspell. It's like to a star. I could not tell you of its construction, only that it cost my great-grandfather dearly to have it of her."

But Jane, bent to pull off her socks, had knelt by that stretch of glimmering white sand. "Are these diamonds?"

"Only sand," said Thor. He knelt beside her. He was smiling, his broad face creased with gentle folds.

She raked her fingers through the sand; it was soft, and it was smooth, too, so very unlike either sand or diamonds that she could only run her hand through it again.

"This isn't sand," she said. She poured little round crystals out from her hand. "It must be perfectly round."

"Here, it's sand," said Thor. "Perhaps on Earth you would call it something else."

"I don't know what," said Jane. "I'd have to run tests, but I don't have any of my equipment. Maybe-- The microscope--"

She clapped her hands together, brushing the sand off, and made to stand. Thor rose with her, unfolding and unfolding, till he stood over her again. She didn't mind. That was the thing about Thor, what made him so unlike all the other tall men she'd known: he didn't tower or loom. He was just there, big and broad and blue-eyed. Something he'd said caught up with her.

"Did you say a star?"

"Like a star," he agreed. "In miniature."

"Underwater?" 

She shielded her eyes to look out across the water; she hadn't a need to. Asgard's sky was without a proper sun; it was night, lit with a thousand, thousand alien stars, each of them at once nearer and farther than any she'd studied. Twilight purpled the sky, but she saw more clearly than ever she'd seen on Earth.

"You said it was constructed--" She strode across the sand toward the water; the tide was coming in. "How? The energy costs to maintain it must be enormous, but if the temperature is anywhere close to a real star there shouldn't even be any water here. It should have all boiled away."

"You may ask the minister of machines," said Thor. "He would explain it to you. He would show it to you, too, if you'd like."

"I didn't even know this was here," she burst. She turned on Thor. "They haven't told me anything. It's just dinners and tours of the palace and everyone's _nice_ , but they treat me like a child on a field trip."

Thor frowned. His brow pinched. "If any have disrespected you--"

The sand was soft beneath her feet, so unlike anything she'd felt before. Jane brushed her hair back from her eyes.

"I came all this way," she said.

"You are here," said Thor.

"There's so much more I want to know," she said.

Thor came to stand beside her. He took her hands in his; he lifted them; he bent his head to consider her fingers, her palms, all of them so slight, so small. But he held them as if they were mighty. As if she, too, were mighty.

"If there is anything you would know," he said, "you need only ask. My mother--" He hesitated. His thumbs stroked over the backs of her hands, lingering at her knuckles. "Your presence here pleases my mother and father. They only wish to please you in return."

"I know," said Jane. "And-- You have to understand, just being here is--" She took her hand from him and gestured, threw her arm out to envelop the whole of Asgard, the sky, the stars above and below. "It's a dream come true. But now that I'm here..." Her hand fell.

"Ask," said Thor. "They would have you happy here." He stroked her hand again. "I would have you happy, too."

"Oh, God," she said. Jane covered her face, her fingertips at her hairline. "I must sound like such a jerk."

"No," said Thor. He smiled so his eyes crinkled again. "You sound like Jane."

"I want your parents to like me," she said to her wrist.

"They will like you more when they know you," he said. He took her hand again, brought it together with her other hand between his palms. Thor bent and kissed the inside of each of her wrists.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"For what?"

"That I did not know your sorrow sooner," he said.

Jane flushed. Her fingers curled against his wrists. Her toes curled in that strange sand.

"I'm not unhappy," she said.

"Jane," he said softly.

She looked to him. He was so golden, Thor, so bright, his blond hair like a lion's mane. He held her hands to his heart.

"I would that you be happy here," he said. "Ask my mother. She will make arrangements for you to speak with the scholars."

Jane rose up on her toes and kissed him. He breathed out in a hot gust, startled, his lips caught against his teeth. Their hands were trapped between them, and his fingers closed about her wrists in such a way that she wanted only to fling her arms around his neck and pull him down to the sand. So she did, sort of, hooking her fingers in his collar and pulling.

"Jane," he murmured into her mouth. 

Her hair spilled out across the sand. The ocean licked at her shoulder, the water warm and sweet-smelling, like honeyed tea. Thor's shoulders framed the sky. He kissed the corner of her mouth, and Jane wove her fingers in that lion's mane of his, the better to keep him there when he would move away.

"I'm happy," she told him. "I'm happy. I am. Thor, I--I crossed _stars_. I went to another _planet_. I'm there right now."

He smiled. There was sand in his beard, that golden stubble that darkened his chin. She didn't know how.

"You're here," he said. He touched a finger to her jaw. "Jane. Doctor Jane Foster. I had thought you lost."

"I wasn't lost," she said. She tugged at his hair, twined a strand about her thumb and pulled that, too. " _You_ were lost."

"Then you came to me," said Thor, cradling her jaw. He kissed the other corner of her mouth. 

Jane wound her arm about his neck and drew him down again. He breathed into her mouth and when he did so, he breathed her name, just her name, only that.

"I'm here," she said, and she was there, there on another world, somewhere no one else had gone, and she had gone there; she had done that; she was there. She was there. Thor was there, too.

"I'm here," said Jane.


End file.
